Marginality in the Hierarchy of Masculinities

In Salur’s feature debut, A Few Kilos of Dates for a Funeral (henceforth referred to as Kilos), the setting of the film emphasizes the marginality of its main characters, Sadri and Yadi, living in the shell of a battered bus at the site of a forgotten petrol station.Footnote ²⁰ Filmed in black and white to reflect the gray and colorless dreams of the characters, the setting was inspired by Salur’s travels from his hometown of Boroujerd in southwest Iran, to Tehran, where he studied. “I often thought of the petrol station that was once situated along the highway and whose prosperity had disappeared with the building of a ring road.”Footnote ²¹ The desolate and stark landscape in which Sadri and Yadi live, far from any other community and with very limited interaction with the outside world, highlights their status as outsiders living on the fringes of society, forgotten and neglected very much like the petrol station they are charged with guarding. All the characters in the film occupy marginal positions within society in general and the hierarchy of masculinities in particular. However, the positions within the hierarchy do not remain unchallenged. In fact, the men constantly attempt to renegotiate their inferior position in relation to those above them within their microcosmic social order resulting in a fluid rather than rigid hierarchy within their small, fragmented group.

The semiotics of the characters’ names reference the roles each of them plays. The epithets are likely abbreviated from loftier religious appellations, but which also reflect the position of these characters within the filmic narrative. Sadri, literally meaning prime, leading—probably a contraction of Sadr al-Din, the Leading one in Religion—had been a pahlavan, a champion, a wrestler and at the apex of the hierarchy of masculinities within his social group. His strength and its display had been his main source of income. The younger man, Yadi, presumably from Yadollah, “the Hand of God,” is now just Yadi, “a hand,” “an assistant” and in fact the underdog of the narrative. Oruj, the undertaker, roams around the roads with his dilapidated van, assisting the state with recovering the bodies of those who have lost their lives in accidents, including from natural causes such as avalanches. Oruj, meaning “ascent,” thus aids with the ascension of the lost spirits who will only be able to rest once they have been buried. The mentally disabled Gholam lives with his elderly father who perennially tries to relinquish his parental responsibility to his older son, Abbas. Gholam, meaning “slave,” is another abbreviation, this time perhaps for “Slave of God” or “slave” of one of the Shi‘i imams. As such, Gholam occupies the lowest rung within the hierarchy of marginal masculinities—evident in the way others, including the underdog, Yadi, mistreat him.

The hierarchy between the two men living within the small, claustrophobic space of the bus is established from the beginning of the film. Yadi has to follow Sadri’s orders not simply as his subordinate in their responsibilities as caretakers of the petrol station but in their daily existence. For example, Yadi is kicked out of the bus into the freezing cold because he dared to question Sadri’s recent obsession with the weather forecast and sudden preference for snow over sun. Yadi’s subservient role is emphasized throughout the film, as Sadri ignores, beats and accuses the latter of lying and stealing. In the absence of women in their lives, they also assume “traditional” gendered roles in relation to each other, with Yadi taking on the “effeminate” character and Sadri the hypermasculine. Yadi cooks, cleans, and weeps at the abuse he receives at the hands of Sadri, calling out for his mother and complaining about his inferior position, crying out: “I’m the weakest man on earth.”

This fragmented group of marginalized men renegotiate their positions within the gender order to recreate a new gender pattern—even if temporarily. “The definition of masculinity is essentially a collective process whereby men compete with other men for validation and confirmation. Masculinity is collectively enforced, protected, and threatened.”Footnote ²² Yadi’s attempts at equalizing his relationship with Sadri are aggressively thwarted by the latter. In their limited social interactions, it is only in relation to Gholam that Yadi can play the dominant role. When Abbas, the postman who hand-delivers Yadi’s love letters to the woman living in the city, brings his mentally disabled younger brother with him, Yadi finally finds an opportunity to assert his authority.Footnote ²³ In his attempts to reverse his subordinate role, Yadi imitates Sadri’s weightlifting exercises, treating Gholam as his minor standing to attention at his master’s side, just as Yadi has to with Sadri. Yadi’s performance of the dominant man, however, is all too brief, soon interrupted by Sadri’s appearance. The former challenges this display of superiority by nonchalantly adding weights to the improvised barbells, reducing Yadi to begging for help under the crushing weights, and thereby proving his ineligibility for any claims to the strongman role. Sadri fiercely rectifies the disrupted order by putting Yadi firmly back in his place as the wimp.

Force and violence is thus not limited to hegemonic masculinity but also assumed by those marginal masculinities re-enacting hegemonic masculinity against others within their own group, creating a further hierarchy within the category. As Connell and Messerschmidt argue, hegemonic masculinity does not necessarily “mean violence” but can be “supported by force” and “ascendancy achieved through culture, institutions, and persuasion.”Footnote ²⁴ In another sequence when Yadi tries to equalize his relation to Sadri by asking the latter to pass him his cup of tea, Sadri throws the tea in his face. When he pretends to be the alpha male in his letters to his beloved, Sadri makes it his business to read them and lashes out at Yadi for pretending to be his superior. Even in the imaginary constructed world of his letters to his beloved, Yadi is not allowed to occupy a higher rank within this marginal masculinity. Abbas’ colleague, who appears to have an only slightly superior position to him at the post office—albeit the dull job of stamping envelopes—is aggressive and violent towards Abbas. Within Abbas’ own household, this hierarchy is comically depicted, by the camera panning upwards from Gholam’s face to Abbas’ hand cutting his hair and smacking his head into position, before panning further up to show the patriarch at the top simultaneously cutting Abbas’ hair and slapping him into position. Overall, these marginal men are not just passive victims, they also enact the injustices they suffer against each other. However, the performance of the hypermasculine man within this marginal masculinity does not ultimately translate into any real privileges within the wider society.

Hegemonic masculinity, Connell and Messerschmidt argue, “is related to particular ways of representing and using men’s bodies.”Footnote ²⁵ Sadri maintains the strength of his body to regulate the social order by positioning himself at the top. However, this is limited to the small group of marginalized masculinities within which he lives.Footnote ²⁶ Outside the confines of this group his mutilated body falls short of the image of the ideal man, relegating him to the lower ranks of masculinity. His blindness in one eye—let alone the limp in his walk—goes against long-held Iranian ideals of the strongman. A number of ancient and medieval Iranian kings reportedly blinded their enemies, rivals, and even heirs, to disqualify their claims to the throne.Footnote ²⁷ Being fully sighted was and continues to be essential to the position of the powerful man and that of hegemonic masculinity. Thus, Sadri’s strength of body alone, displayed a number of times throughout the film, is insufficient to allow him any privileged position within mainstream Iranian society.

The influence of global ideas of masculinity even in a highly local context is humorously alluded to by the life-size cut-out of David Beckham that the management sends to the petrol station in a bid to attract customers. Global masculinities, Connell and Messerschmidt argue, are “constructed in transnational arenas such as world politics and transnational business and media.”Footnote ²⁸ In the absence of any heroic figures or desired models of masculinity in the film, Beckham’s cardboard replica stands in for hegemonic masculinity. McKay et al. argue that “the ‘metrosexual’ epitomized by soccer player David Beckham” is a “recent rearticulation of the [new lad] archetype” in western media “whose status as a globally recognized sport star is traditionally associated with [Connell’s] ‘the frontline troops of patriarchy.’”Footnote ²⁹ Sadri’s disdain for this intruder holding the championship cup juxtaposes the attitude of the pahlavans of the past towards the global champions of the present. International sport stars such as Beckham embody hegemonic masculinity, which subsequently challenges and even reshapes local ideas of hegemonic masculinities. In this way, local and regional ideals of championship gradually become inconsequential. The Pahlavi modernization and westernization project as well as the continued global domination of transnational ideals of masculinity have consequently rendered local champions irrelevant to Iranian society. In fact, it is not simply Sadri’s disabled body that pushes him to the fringes but, more importantly, Iranian society’s loss of predilection for its old pahlavans that does.

Parviz (2012) is Majid Barzegar’s second feature film. His debut feature, Rainy Season (2010), explores the alienation of a middle-class teenage boy whose parents are separating and in their “progressive” attitude leave him to fend for himself for long periods of time. His third film, A Very Ordinary Citizen (2015), examines the alienation of an elderly man on the verge of dementia, also living on his own with no female relatives and only a son who lives abroad. Male loneliness and isolation, distant father—son relationships, and the absence of women in the lives of these men are the main themes that bind these films. Together, they are arguably a trilogy, with each respectively examining the three stages of the contemporary middle-class Iranian man: youth, midlife and old age.

Parviz opens with the break-up of a father–son relationship.Footnote ³⁰ The marginal and claustrophobic existence of Parviz is established within the first sequence of the film, which opens in the dark room occupied by the large, angry and frustrated Parviz delivering obscenities over the phone as he heaves himself around within the small space. Iranian narratives abound with estranged relationships between fathers and sons that end with the former being responsible for the tragic end of the latter’s lives.Footnote ³¹ These include ancient stories such as those of Rostam and Sohrab, Kay Khusraw and Siyavash, and Goshtasp and Esfandiyar, to name a few. More recently, in Iranian cinema, Majidi’s Color of Paradise (1998) depicts the strained relationship of a father with his blind son. Desperate to rid himself of his son to make way for the arrival of a new wife into his life, the father causes the death of his son. As with Rostam, this is followed by belated regret, but without any of the legendary hero’s redeeming features. Majidi’s Parviz is far from the innocent young sons of the above narratives, or more generally the socially admired models of masculinity constructed within the images of these heroes.

For the last thirty years, the fifty-year-old Parviz has lived in the heart of an upper-middle-class building complex, spending his time running errands for the community and taking responsibility for the upkeep of the buildings. Even though he is one of the residents he clearly holds a subordinate role. In the absence of a woman within the household for the past fifteen years, Parviz has taken on the “traditional” feminine role and been responsible for cooking, shopping and cleaning, living with his father. As such, his masculinity is already demarcated as being far from the desired “traditional” male role because “patterns of masculinity are socially defined in contradistinction from some model (whether real or imaginary) of femininity.”Footnote ³² At best, Parviz appears content with, and at worst indifferent to occupying a subordinate masculinity in the hierarchy of power and privilege. This incorporation of non-hegemonic masculinities “into a functioning gender order rather than by active oppression in the form of discredit or violence” is in fact one of the ways that “hegemony may be accomplished.”Footnote ³³

However, this takes a turn for the worse once Parviz’s father forces him to leave the family home to make way for his new wife, Azar. Parviz becomes redundant in the father’s life now that he is being replaced with a wife who can cook and clean for him. This is followed by the community’s rejection of Parviz’s contributions, rendering him a complete outsider and pushing him from a subordinate to a marginal position. Parviz, who has lived in his parental house all his life, becomes the abject in Julia Kristeva’s definition of the term ‘abject’ as “everything that is filthy or disorderly or uncivilized is in the same ‘place’ as the left-behind mother, in the realm of the abject.”Footnote ³⁴ Parviz’s obese body, and his place outside the accepted gender roles and social conventions, situate him within the realm of the “abject” which “does not respect borders, positions, rules” and is “The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”Footnote ³⁵ Once the father rejects and banishes Parviz, the community is quick to follow. Despite his efficiency and hard work, Parviz is quickly stripped of all responsibilities, being denied both his individual as well as his social and communal identity. One of the ways that socially dominant masculinities assert their position is through the “Marginalization or delegitimation of alternatives.”Footnote ³⁶ Subsequently, despite his significant contributions to the life of the community, they are seen as inferior and subordinate, and Parviz is pushed to a marginal position within the hegemonic order of masculinities.

The dry-cleaner reinforces Parviz’s marginal position within the gender order by reminding him how he is the subject of the community’s ridicule and lacks all that his father possesses. In outlining the father’s attributes, he delineates contemporary ideals of masculinity within particular sections of Iranian society: the father dresses smartly, looks after himself, is financially well-off, and at an advanced age can still remarry a desirable woman. In sum, he embodies the ideal of hegemonic masculinity, which is “related to particular ways of representing and using men’s bodies.”Footnote ³⁷ In contrast, Parviz leads a feminine and infantilized existence. Even though he is a middle-aged man, he is still financially dependent on his father, smokes secretly, is not married, does not have a regular job, is obese, and dresses scruffily. This is further emphasized by showing Parviz’s limited socialization with children and teenagers: he plays table tennis with them, and later allows the teenager Ashkan to use his flat for everything the latter is restricted from doing in his own house, such as smoking, keeping a dog as a pet, and receiving phone calls from girls. However, the film does not celebrate the hegemonic masculinity of the father. Despite embodying the ideals of hegemonic masculinity, his dull existence is alluded to by the dark and cold colors in which he appears, the deafening silence in the house, and the absence of any smiles on his face throughout the film. He retains this solemn expression throughout the film, even when returning home with his bride after their marriage ceremony. Similarly, Parviz, the embodiment of dejected masculinity, never smiles. Instead, sadness pervades the entire film. The film’s color, tone and mood, such as the dark and claustrophobic opening sequence with Parviz’s labored breathing, reflect not only the alienation of the character but the society at large; a claustrophobia reminiscent of Ebrahim Golestan’s 1964 Brick and Mirror.Footnote ³⁸

When Parviz’s desperate attempts at regaining his place both with the father and the community fail, he falls into further dejection. For example, in a bid to appease his father, who detests the neighborhood dogs, Parviz poisons them.Footnote ³⁹ However, his efforts at starting afresh with his father fail. When he finally accepts the dry-cleaner’s help at finding a job as a night-watch after being forced out of the petty jobs at the building complex, the community still refuses to recognize his efforts to comply with the social conventions and rejects him. It is as though once he has been pushed to the margins, attaining even a subordinate position becomes impossible. Frustrated, he lashes out against the established social order, and in striving to lift himself out of his marginal position, he asserts force and violence over those around him with both random and pre-meditated acts of aggression. He articulates his status within the hierarchy through his response to the dry-cleaner’s persistent reproaches: “Do you enjoy constantly beating me on the head?” He then bludgeons the unsuspecting dry-cleaner to death and nonchalantly proceeds to pick a suit from the dry-cleaner’s, dressing finely and inviting himself over to his father’s house for dinner. His final act of enacting hegemonic masculinity is only accomplished through violence. At the end, he reverses the Iranian patriarchal narrative, literally taking over his father’s seat at the dinner table, ordering him to sit, smoking in his face, and for the first time speaking his mind and demanding to be heard. However, this is not a triumph over patriarchy. The film ends ambiguously with Parviz threateningly facing the father and his stepmother. It remains unclear if the Iranian narrative comes to an Oedipal conclusion. However, regardless of the final outcome, it is a tragedy without any edifying moral. Parviz’s assertion of hegemonic masculinity is accompanied by violence and the use of his body as a weapon. Subordinate and marginal masculinities can ultimately only strive to embody rather than confront hegemonic masculinities.

In Mirkarimi’s Today (2014), rather than celebrating the valor and sacrifices of the warrior in the battlefield, the hypermasculine image of the warrior is subverted not only by presenting his broken body but also by questioning the very definition of valor, sacrifice, heroism and subsequently “masculinity” and its relevance to contemporary Iranian society. Mirkarimi is a director with an artistic flair for simple yet profound stories. Like his earlier films, A Cube of Sugar (2011) and As Simple as That (2008), the story of Today unfolds in less than 24 hours. Yet the narrative of the film extends beyond these few hours to tell stories of times gone by, some of which are of mythical proportions. Mirkarimi documents the extraordinary in the banal and everyday lives of ordinary people to reflect upon the traumas and challenges of a nation struggling with both its past and its present. A war veteran himself, Mirkarimi challenges the state’s dominant discourse on the hero and the warrior.

The character of the hero in Today departs starkly from traditional depictions of the male protagonists in Iranian cinema. Indeed, he is neither the hypermasculine hero of pre-Revolutionary commercial cinema nor the conflicted man negotiating between the contradicting demands of tradition and modernity who appears in much of recent Iranian art-house cinema such as Farhadi’s A Separation (2011), The Past (2013) and The Salesman (2016), nor even the anti-hero character of the two films discussed earlier in the article.Footnote ⁴⁰

The departure from these traditional depictions is not in and of itself a new phenomenon. In fact, these redefinitions of the hero can be seen in numerous other cultural productions in contemporary Iran. For example, in his Ya Ali Maddad series the painter and war veteran Khosrow Hassanzadeh nostalgically repositions the wrestler at the center of his montaged photographs from the past, placing the clergy, the police and the elite in periphery to the traditional hero. Fereydoun Ave’s despondent series Rostam in the Dead of Winter (2009), on the other hand, presents the despair of the modern Iranian man against a background of doom, filled with vultures, hyenas and wolves waiting to devour the fatigued hero. For its part, Mirkarimi’s Today is a cinematic redefinition of a masculinity traditionally associated with virility, manhood and warriorship.

Parviz Parastouei delivers a superb performance as the stoic middle-aged taxi-driver, Yunes, whose chance encounter with the young, pregnant and injured passenger, Seddiqeh, drives the narrative of the story. With his imperturbable demeanor, Yunes is a man of few words. Yet his limp and his familiarity with the hospital grounds—once a major center for treating the wounded of the Iran‒Iraq war—subtly reveal him as a war veteran. Both the hospital, whose grounds and facilities are encroached on for more profitable endeavors, and Yunes, whose able and young body is now a distant memory, no longer hold the value they once enjoyed in society. Instead, memories of the past have been buried deep within each of them, neglected and forgotten, but beautifully visualized in the film through the derelict room that stores the remnants of the past as Yunes wanders into it under a flickering light. Now past the prime of his life and partially disabled, Yunes has been relegated to the margins of both social and male hierarchy.

Today’s battlegrounds are no longer remote warfronts where soldiers like Yunes fought for their ideals. Instead, Tehran is the combat zone, reflecting a society grappling with many ills and at war with itself. The economic situation has crippled many: men work literally all hours, not having seen Tehran’s daytime for years, students who drive taxis at night, and women who cannot afford to pay their taxi fares or their hospital charges when in labor. All of them look like defeated soldiers returning from the battleground. Marginalization has encompassed a large segment of society in contemporary Iran. Unlike the characters in Kilos, Mirkarimi’s hero lives at the very heart of society. But as a wounded soldier and a taxi driver, he is marginal to the hegemonic discourses, be they constructed by the Islamic Republic, which privileges its allies, or by the middle-class nurses and doctors at the hospital.

In Kilos, remote, harsh surroundings demarcate marginal spaces. In Parviz it was the derelict house, which the protagonist is forced to move in. In Today, however, Mirkarimi depicts the entire city as hostile and marginalizing. He employs sound and camera movements such as Tehran’s chaotic traffic noises, the bumpy rides over potholes, the bashing of the taxi’s side mirror by an indifferent motorcyclist, and the removal of old utensils from the hospital grounds to map the city as a warfront, with Yunes as witness to this continuing aggression. Yet Yunes remains unperturbed, whether driving in the battleground of Tehran’s chaotic traffic or in the face of the accusing glances, comments and even physical abuse of the hospital staff who mistake him for Seddiqeh’s violent husband.

The hostility and aggression is thus not simply limited to the busy roads but extends to people’s interactions with each other. This is established from the opening scene of the film, where Yunes’ passenger verbally abuses someone whom he clearly knows intimately and is taking to court. Similarly, the hospital secretary reacts aggressively towards Yunes; the head nurse, Ms Majd, is suspicious of everyone; and the doctor who believes Yunes to be responsible for Seddiqeh’s injuries and eventual death has no qualms in using against Yunes the very same violence of which he accuses him. Mirkarimi asserted that the decision to depict this hidden violence in the film was deliberate. “Everyone is thinking and talking about the man who has inflicted such misery upon this woman and yet he is absent. However, the violence and aggression within the other characters fill in for his absence.”Footnote ⁴¹ As such, the violence committed by another is used to justify their own, with each displaying the capacity to inflict the very same torment upon others.

Mirkarimi claims his film is a reflection of Iran’s current socio-political context. The film was made towards the end of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, under what Mirkarimi refers to as a climate of shirking responsibilities, a culture of blame and the practice of condemning others to escape accusations against oneself—all of which crept beyond the government and enveloped ordinary people. Atwood refers to post-Khatami Iran as having “been marked by the same sense of futility and hopelessness that afflicted the intellectual classes in the early and mid-1990s.”Footnote ⁴²

Mirkarimi explains the reaction of audiences and critics who argued that they could relate to all but the character of Yunes, as a reflection of where Iranians are today as a society. They could relate to characters who were judgmental and aggressive but not to Yunes who was neither. Our urfi or socially accepted behavior, Mirkarimi argues, has remodeled aggression as a socially acceptable behavior, and when these audiences compared themselves with Yunes, they found themselves falling short of him at least in one of those situations. Interestingly, Barzegar also mentions this societal mood during Ahmadinejad’s presidency, particularly after the 2009 elections, as one of the main reasons for his own film’s bleak depiction.

Mirkarimi’s Today presents the marginal masculinity as the forgotten hero of Iranian values and ideals rather than as the victim of the dominant masculinities. He emphasized that in Today he wanted to present his role model of a man. He continued:

Thus, Yunes does not embody the stereotypical image of the javanmard as a warrior but rather as a spiritual champion. In discussing the spiritual champion in the work of Husayn Va‘ez Kashifi, the sixteenth-century Sufi, Arley Loewen states:

The film is not about the disappearance of the hero but is a critical look at what it means to be one. It is not simply Yunes’ participation in war that turns him into a hero. In fact, it is his total silence on the matter, his refusal to invoke the special privileges the state affords to war veterans, and the absence of any sense of entitlement that endows him with heroic qualities. Unlike Haj Kazem, the protagonist of The Glass Agency (Hatamikia, 1998), Yunes does not impose his ideals on others. The celebrated director of the Sacred Defense Cinema, Ebrahim Hatamikia, narrates the story of a war veteran, Haj Kazem, in this classic Iran‒Iraq war film. Parastui, playing the protagonist in Today, starred as Haj Kazem, a war veteran who takes hostages in a travel agency to demand a defense of the values he had fought for in the war. In creating the character of Yunes, Mirkarimi refers to the influence of Ali Shariati’s statement about the two characteristics he deeply dislikes seeing in men. One is the inclination to seek sympathy (dard-o del kardan) and the second is the constant loquacious defensiveness of themselves. These are the two things that Mirkarimi states that he stripped out from his character. In constructing an alternative heroic masculinity, Mirkarimi is not creating a new value system, but harking back to an older definition of masculinity, such as that of Shari‘ati, which has since been marginalized by the domination of other competing discourses of masculinity.

In proposing a new construction of the ideal man whose marginality is integral to his idealism, Mirkarimi smashes the stereotypical image of the virile and able body of the masculine warrior not to point to a crisis of masculinity but to redefine the new Iranian hero and the traditionally associated features of virility, masculinity and warriorship. The Qur’anic film Kingdom of Solomon (2010) provides the prototype of the ideal man—the prophet-king—in which the most dominant image of Solomon is that of a warrior.Footnote ⁴⁵ In order to bring peace to his kingdom, Solomon’s battles are not simply limited to the people who oppose him but also extends to the nonphysical realm including jinns and demons that have to be subjugated. His virility is reflected through the heavily pregnant body of his wife and his military aptitude, which is displayed through his skills in horsemanship and sword-fighting, not to mention his divine appointment and supernatural abilities in controlling the wind and enslaving the jinns and the demons. In contrast, the infertile, disabled and underprivileged Yunes in Today is the silent hero in a Tehran that breeds hidden violence.

Mirkarimi problematizes many of the long-held and widely propagated ideas regarding sacrifice, valor, virility and masculinity. In fact, it is not the display of the strong body but ironically Yunes’ disability that marks him out as a warrior. His participation in the sacred defense, however, does not define his heroism. Yunes emerges as the silent unsung hero on a different battlefield, one which has perpetuated inwardly long after the Iran‒Iraq war. Valor is not to be celebrated with pomp and ceremony. It is the fortitude with which Yunes stays true to his values and sidesteps the pervasive aggression. Unlike the prevalent depictions, it is no feat of masculinity to uphold female honor through violence or control. And yet, without judgment, Yunes generously gives of his reputation to a female stranger who desperately asks for it so she can provide legitimacy to her unborn child in a society that demands female chastity. As such, Mirkarimi invites his audiences to reconsider the social conventions and constructions of masculinity and heroism, and reimagine a new hero independent of the hierarchies of masculinities.

Mirkarimi maintained that the theme of the film was also partly derived from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which reflects upon long-held debates on the legal and moral obligations of humans to each other. This is a debate that Mirkarimi found pertinent to Iranian society during Ahmadinejad’s presidency and which has once again found urgency in the recent crisis of stranded refugees and migrants on the borders of Europe. As the ex-convict Jean Valjean kidnaps Cosset to offer her the possibility of a better life in Les Misérables, so too does Yunes kidnap Seddiqeh’s new-born to provide her with a life better than what her mother had ever enjoyed. While Javert in Les Misérables is the embodiment of the law, striving to create a disciplined society, it is the head nurse, Ms Majd, who takes on this role in Mirkarimi’s Today. However, the law, Mirkarimi argues, becomes an escape from our ethical duties. For Jean Valjean and Yunes the law constitutes only the minimum of our social commitments. While the law provides us with protection from each other, it does not encompass our ethical responsibilities to each other. To test out the ideas of valor, sacrifice and true heroism, the modern-day Iranian protagonist of Today draws heavily from the French hero rather than any specific Shi‘i or Iranian icons. The film reminds viewers of their duty to each other, which goes beyond the letter of the law. The limitations of law are not unique to the theocratic state but also common to those states claiming supremacy over others for upholding human equality and dignity. Just as Les Misérables is a universal story within a very French context, Today is a universal story about heroism within a very Iranian context.

Marginal Masculinity and Women

Dominance over women is an important criterion of hegemonic masculinity.Footnote ⁴⁶ The marginal masculinities in Kilos and Parviz, however, struggle to establish any form of relationship with women. Their absence in the male homosocial space of Kilos is conspicuous. On the rare occasion that either of the two female figures appears in a sequence, their face is barely shown. They remain mute except for the bride’s brief and formal declaration of consent to marrying Abbas. However, women’s absence and silence in these films is not a deliberate continuation of certain trends in both pre- and post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema that pushed women to the margins.Footnote ⁴⁷ In fact, despite the absence of women on screen, the film’s narrative is driven by the compulsive need for female love. This desire for a relationship with the opposite sex becomes the only source of meaning in their otherwise banal and bleak existence.

As the film develops, the reason for Sadri’s recent obsession with the weather forecast is revealed to be his desire to preserve the frozen body of a woman whose car was buried under snowdrift. With this discovery, Sadri, who had only loved once before, finds the opportunity to love again. The female corpse fills in for a real relationship that he had lacked all his life, allowing him to once again find a purpose in life. He dresses up for his secret visits and speaks to her as though she were alive. Just as he has assumed the role of hegemonic masculinity in their small and fragmented homosocial group, he adopts the role of the protective male in relation to the woman. He assures the corpse that he will do everything to preserve her from the encroaching spring sun. When he realizes her jewelry is missing he becomes furious and goes on to stow her car in a different location.Footnote ⁴⁸

Sadri remains reticent about his personal affairs. His monologues, dressed up as conversations with the female corpse, reveal snippets of his past. He relates how he had been a pahlavan, and made a living by displaying his strength in street performances. However, his love for a woman whose face he had never seen but whose voice had stolen his heart ultimately led to his downfall. The fully veiled woman would come to his performances, complimenting him at the end of each of them. After that, he was no longer the same person. His distraction eventually led to his hands faltering and he dropped the car he was lifting. The crowds mocked him, after which she never returned. This public failure of performance of masculinity resulted in the loss of his position both within society and with the woman. As he puts it to the female corpse, he “now knows that he can conquer everything other than his heart.” The woman is responsible for his disability, downfall and broken heart. Similarly, it is a woman who causes Yadi to stoop to stealing her jewelry to impress his own love-interest. As he tells Sadri: “I’ve only stolen once for the woman I loved but you know what I’m talking about.”

The first time Sadri fell in love, it was with the voice of a “bodiless and faceless” woman with whom he did not find the courage to converse; the second time, he fell in love with a lifeless woman with whom he could finally speak. This struggle to form a relationship with a woman is a theme that can be traced in modern Persian literature. Many of Sadeq Hedayat’s non-heroic characters, for example, experience alienation from women, failing to enter a romantic relationship with them. The convenience of loving a lifeless woman appears in his short story “The Doll Behind the Curtain,” in which the protagonist, Mehrdad, falls for a mannequin in a shop window, for in his eyes she “transcended his wildest fantasies of love and beauty.” More importantly, she

Referring to Hedayat’s oeuvre, Hillman asserts, “Story after story depicts alienation, rejection, antipathy toward others, unhappiness, defeat, death, a deformed society, individuals deformed by fate, dysfunctional romantic and sexual relationships, and meaninglessness of life.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Similarly, in pre-Revolutionary Iranian cinema, the crisis of masculinity, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, is not so much of masculinity’s assertion of power and authority over female subjectivities but partly their struggle and ultimate failure to form a relationship with them.Footnote ⁵¹ That the gendered social and political discourse within Iran magnifies these obstacles is, of course, undeniable, and many recent art house films, including those discussed here, critically examine the challenges of establishing relationships and intimacy in a gendered society.

These “bodiless” or mute women in Kilos are not, however, depicted as passive victims of a patriarchal society. Sadri’s first love, despite being fully covered in her chador, attended public events such as Sadri’s street performances and boldly expressed her desire. His second love is out of his league. She is an educated woman independent enough to drive alone to remote areas to take photographs. Even though each of these women belong to different social backgrounds, both are mobile, participate in the public sphere and have some independence from the patriarchal boundaries of their society. In contrast, Sadri appears imprisoned by his circumstances, only seen moving within the space between the derelict bus and the car of the lifeless woman.

The dysfunctional relationship between the genders is evident in the absence of any form of conversation between them. The men’s numerous attempts at discourse with women are fraught with challenges. Yadi continues to write letter after letter without receiving a single response. He is so desperate for any reaction from the woman that after Abbas returns from supposedly delivering one of his letters, he enquires: “She said nothing? Not even a bad word?” It is finally Abbas, the man who plucks up the courage to directly approach the woman, who wins her affection. In reality, however, this victory has taken the efforts of two marginalized men. Instead of delivering Yadi’s letters, Abbas copies and presents them as his own, finally resulting in the woman’s marriage to the him.Footnote ⁵²

Where these marginal men fail with words, popular songs are used to express their emotions. When Abbas returns from delivering his last letter, which was enthusiastically snatched through the window by his future wife, he triumphantly sings: “Hay hay Rashid Khan, Sardar-e koll-e Iran” (Hail, Hail, Rashid Khan, the Commander of all of Iran). For his part, Sadri tells the lifeless woman that since he finds himself inadequate with words he has brought his cassette player with him so they can listen to music instead. The lyrics tellingly express his affection for her: “You are all I have in my life, everything I possess is yours … ” However, silence is all that Yadi and Sadri receive in return. Sadri pleads to the lifeless woman: “At least you say something, they’re looking for you, and the weather is getting warmer and warmer.”

The presence of women in their life can be disruptive for subordinated and marginalized men. The arrival of Azar in the father’s life in Parviz results in the ejection of the son, the subordinate masculinity, from the family home to allow the patriarch sole and complete domination over his space—and woman—away from Parviz’s prying eyes. Azar’s subordinate relation to her new husband in merely a replacement for Parviz’s role, with the addition of sexual gratification. The cold body language and limited conversation between the father and Azar in the film is telling of the lack of any genuine companionship between the two. Indeed, from his brief conversations with her, Parviz appears to know more about Azar than his father, such as her smoking habit and that her soon-to-be husband’s financial prospects prove crucial to her decision to marry him. This is further evident when, at dinner, Parviz points out the silence between the couple (“You don’t have anything to say to each other?”), thereby enraging his father. In fact, when it comes to their relationships with women, hegemonic masculinity’s success in procuring a wife is not the marker of triumph it may first appear to be in overcoming the struggles faced by marginalized and subordinated masculinities. Indeed, they can remain equally isolated, and alienated from women.

Repressed sexual desire is alluded to in Parviz’s longing glances at the young couple in the lift, and later the deliberate undressing of a mannequin in a window shop that he sets up as being burgled. One of the film’s references to the politics of gendered space is the newspapers covering the windows of the dingy flat that Parviz is forced to move into. He stops removing the newspapers after seeing the figure of a man/boy appear on a balcony opposite where a woman is hanging clothes on a line. Only later, when Ashkan’s mother, a divorcee, returns the gaze, does he remove a further few newspapers. In a strictly monitored cinema where sexual liaisons are not depicted, this is briefly referred to in her summarily dismissing Parviz from her flat, and her anxiety over Ashkan finding out that Parviz had been there. Parviz is once again ejected as the “abject,” this time by a woman, whom he appears to have failed to impress or satisfy. The marginal man once again fails to make an impression on the woman he desires. The teenage Ashkan—a hegemonic masculinity in the making—on the other hand, succeeds where Parviz fails, establishing a number of relationships with girls. In fact, Ashkan uses Parviz’s house to enact hegemonic masculinity.

In Today, the mystery of the lonely Seddiqeh and her predicament points to the suffering of the many women who live under patriarchy, a recurring theme in Mirkarimi’s films. Just as one of the nurses is unsure of the relationship between Yunes and Seddiqeh and asks her colleague if Yunes is Seddiqeh’s father or husband, we, too, are no wiser as to whether her three pregnancies are the result of rape or temporary marriage. In fact, it is the agony of not knowing who Seddiqeh is, and her story, that reminds us of the struggles of the many unknown, unheard women who suffer silently and invisibly even as they are potently burdened with shouldering the taboos of society.

Hugo’s Jean Valjean might have had the strength of Rostam—and both in turn enjoyed that strength well into their middle age—but Yunes is no Rostam. Despite his financial constraints, he refuses to invoke the special privileges that the state affords war veterans and declines the offer to use it to underwrite Seddiqeh’s hospital fees. He also refuses to declare her as destitute to qualify for charitable funds and as such maintains her dignity.

Despite its parallels to Les Misérables, Today remains firmly rooted in its cultural context, critically commenting on contemporary Iranian society with the semiotics of the names Yunes and Seddiqeh referring to Qur’anic and Shi‘i narratives. Like the prophet, Yunes initially flees from his mission (the hospital) only to repent (return). Seddiqeh’s broken ribs, early labor and subsequent death act as a reminder of Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, whose innocence and death are so venerated in Shi‘ism. Mirkarimi proposes an alternative male role model that is far from both the hypermasculine protagonists of commercial Iranian films, and the despair of the male characters, who dominate art-house Iranian films. He, in fact, calls for a new heroism that challenges the core of accepted definitions of masculinity and warriorship and their relationship to women.